All symposium lectures, workshops, performances, and panel discussions are free and open to the public. No registration is required.

Visitors are encouraged to stop by our information table in Templeton Campus Center outside the Council Chamber from 9-5 daily to talk with symposium organizers, pick up a program, and learn more about the events.

Please note that this schedule is subject to change.

Watzek Library Display

As of March 1, Watzek Library has a temporary exhibit exploring the idea of “inSECURITY.” On the top floor of the library, Lewis & Clark’s Special Collections is displaying for the first time its collection of material relating to the lesbian communes that developed in eastern Oregon throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This exhibit runs through the end of the spring term.

Additionally, the Diversions book display in the Watzek atrium features books related to this year’s theme, including publications by the keynote speakers. These books can be checked out at the circulation desk.

Wednesday, March 7

This workshop will be rooted in the concept of creating community in craft, and continuing a tradition of weaving in Portland. Participants will learn some fundamentals of weaving. All supplies will be provided. No experience necessary. Limited to 15 participants.

This interactive workshop will explore questions of gender, sexuality, and security through physical modes of sensing and feeling. Through a series of somatic exercises, we will engage with space and touch, as well as topics such as consent, awareness, judgment, and perception, in order to question the body as a site for outward expression and performance. Though this workshop engages with physical understanding, folks are encouraged to move and participate in whichever ways which are most accessible and comfortable for them. Limited to 30 participants.

“Insecurity” often has a negative connotation. This workshop invites participants to reflect on that and to also consider experiences of insecurity as openness to change, spontaneity, and ambiguity. How do we personally experience “insecurity” in relation to gender? How is writing related to the experience of insecurity? This workshop invites participants to explore the conference theme through personal writing and will provide the opportunity to contemplate how insecurity relates to writing: insecurity as a barrier to writing, an impetus for writing, a topic of writing, an outcome of writing.

1:45–3:15 p.m., Council ChamberYouth Vulnerability, Security, and Resilience
Moderator: Maureen Reed, L&C college advisor and fellowships advisorPaula Martin, doctoral student in comparative human development, University of Chicago, “Anticipated Futures: Gender Expansive Youth and Bodily Intervention”Folasade Mojisola Oludayo, graduate student, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Oregon State University, “Girl Child Trafficking: A Global Trend Among Girls Experiencing Violence and Neglect in the Yoruba Ethnic Group in Nigeria”Eva Newbold, graduate student, women’s studies, University of Florida, “Representations of Girlhood in Wartime: The Effects of the Iraq War on American Girlhood as Explored in the Novel Dear Blue Sky”Emily Squires, engagement and education specialist at Sexual and Gender Minority Youth Resource Center (SMYRC), and Veronica Green (Klamath), senior at NAYA’s Early College Academy

7 p.m., Templeton Campus Center, Council Chamber*Keynote PresentationCarceral Feminism and Prison Abolition: Black Feminist Reflections on State and Intimate ViolenceBeth E. Richie, professor of African American studies and law, criminology, and justice, University of Illinois at Chicago

In “dreaming futures like bread in our children’s mouths,” as Audre Lorde said, we can also reach and root to the past—to the sick and disabled, queer and trans, Black and brown ancestors, blood and chosen, known and forgotten, who resisted in enormous and small, undetected ways, to make freedom, justice, and safety happen in ways that allow us to be here. In this interactive writing workshop, we will have a chance to write about the chosen and blood ancestors whose stories carry us, to imagine and remember the safety and freedom—in all its blood, guts and complexity—that they knew. This workshop is open to all but centers Black, Indigenous, and People of color, and is disabled, working class, and femme as fuck. Limited to 30 participants.

3:30–5 p.m., Gregg PavilionWorkshop: Digging In To Act Out: Creating Spaces of Security for LGBTQ Students
Facilitated by Bethy Leonardi, PhD, and Sara Staley, PhD, research associates in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-founders of A Queer Endeavor

Historically, institutions of education have been biased toward particular kinds of learners and particular ideas about what is “normal.” This session will focus on how taken-for-granted norms surrounding gender and sexuality tend to silence and isolate students who identify as LGBTQ. In this 90-minute workshop, participants will engage in critical self-reflection and dialogue as they question, “What counts as normal?” in our classrooms and on campus, and what am I doing, knowingly and unknowingly, to create more people who fit that norm? Participants will learn strategies for organizing learning environments that are expansive and affirming of gender and sexual diversity and that support LGBTQ students. Co-sponsored by L&C Teaching Excellence Program and Queer Student Union.﻿

5–6:30 p.m., ThayerInformation Session and Reception hosted by Oregon State University graduate program in Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies

Learn about MA and PhD programs in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Oregon State University, as well as the Queer Studies minor, Oregon State Queer Archives, and Feminist Formations, a national journal currently based at OSU. Light refreshments.